Special thanks to 5 Under 35 honorees Kirstin Allio, Matthew Eck, Amity Gaige, Asali Solomon, Josh Weil, Tiphanie Yanique, and Charles Yu for providing wonderful appreciations of the following Finalist books:
- 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (Josh Weil)
- 1956: A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor (Kirstin Allio and Matthew Eck)
- 1956: The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories by Eudora Welty (Kirstin Allio)
- 1958: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (Amity Gaige)
- 1959: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Matthew Eck)
- 1961: Rabbit, Run by John Updike (Amity Gaige)
- 1962: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Matthew Eck)
- 1970: Going Places by Leonard Michaels (Matthew Eck)
- 1970: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut (Charles Yu)
- 1972: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories by Cynthia Ozick (Kirstin Allio)
- 1975: Guilty Pleasures by Donald Barthelme (Charles Yu)
- 1975: Sula by Toni Morrison (Asali Solomon and Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1975: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley (Kirstin Allio)
- 1976: Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories by Vladimir Nabokov (Kirstin Allio)
- 1980: Collected Stories by Paul Bowles (Amity Gaige)
- 1987: The Counterlife by Philip Roth (Charles Yu)
- 1988: Libra by Don DeLillo (Charles Yu)
- 1992: Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1992: Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 1993: Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers (Charles Yu)
- 1994: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley (Matthew Eck)
- 2000: The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter (Tiphanie Yanique)
- 2004: Florida by Christine Schutt (Josh Weil)
- 2007: Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard (Josh Weil)
